Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Pope Joins With BLM

In this June 1, 2020, photo provided by the Catholic Diocese of El Paso, Bishop Mark Seitz, center, kneels with other demonstrators at Memorial Park holding a Black Lives Matter sign in El Paso, Texas. Pope Francis called Seitz unexpectedly after he was photographed at the protest. (Fernie Ceniceros/Catholic Diocese of El Paso via AP)


VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis called George Floyd by name, twice, and offered support to an American bishop who knelt in prayer during a Black Lives Matter protest.
Cardinals black and white have spoken out about Floyd's death, and the Vatican’s communications juggernaut has shifted into overdrive to draw attention to the cause he now represents.
Under normal circumstances, Floyd’s killing at the hands of a white police officer and the global protests denouncing racism and police brutality might have drawn a muted diplomatic response from the Holy See. But in a U.S. election year, the intensity and consistency of the Vatican’s reaction suggests that, from the pope on down, it is seeking to encourage anti-racism protesters while making a clear statement about where American Catholics should stand ahead of President Donald Trump's bid for a second term in November.
Francis “wants to send a very clear message to these conservative Catholics here who are pro-Trumpers that, ‘Listen, this is just as much of an issue as abortion is,’” said Anthea Butler, a presidential visiting fellow at Yale Divinity School.
Butler, who is African American, said the Vatican is telling Catholics “to pay attention to the racism that is happening and the racism that is in your own church in America.”
The Vatican has long spoken out about racial injustice, and popes dating to Paul VI have voiced support for the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr.’s message of nonviolent protest. History’s first pope from the global south is no different. He quoted King at length during his historic speech to the U.S. Congress in 2015 and met with King’s daughter, as his predecessor had done.
But the degree to which Francis and the Vatican have seized on Floyd's killing is unusual and suggests a coordinated messaging strategy aimed at a national church that Francis has long criticized for its political and ideological partisanship, said Alberto Melloni, a church historian and secretary of the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Studies in Bologna, Italy.
“It’s not like seven people had the same type of reaction” by chance, Melloni said.
Last week, Francis denounced the “sin of racism” and twice identified Floyd as the victim of a “tragic” killing. In a message read in Italian and English during his general audience, Francis expressed concerns about violence during the protests, saying it was self-destructive.
He also said, “We cannot close our eyes to any form of racism or exclusion, while pretending to defend the sacredness of every human life.”
It was a clear effort to call out some conservative Catholics for whom the abortion issue is paramount, while other “life” issues dear to Francis — racism, immigration, the death penalty and poverty — play second fiddle at the ballot box.
Francis has firmly upheld the church's opposition to abortion. And polls show a plurality of American Catholics support significant restrictions on legal abortion.
But Francis has also lamented that the U.S. church is “obsessed” with abortion, contraception and gay marriage to the detriment of its other teachings. Trump is staking his outreach to Catholic voters largely on his anti-abortion platform.
Francis spoke out June 3 after Trump posed in front of an Episcopal church near the White House, Bible in hand, after law enforcement aggressively forced protesters away from a nearby park.
A day later, Trump visited the St. John Paul II shrine, a visit denounced by the highest-ranking African American prelate in the U.S., Archbishop Wilton Gregory of Washington, D.C., whom Francis appointed to the politically important position last year. Gregory said he found it “baffling and reprehensible that any Catholic facility would allow itself to be so egregiously misused and manipulated.”
In that vein, the pope’s phone call to Texas Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso last week appeared quietly significant. Seitz has taken a leading role in demanding fair treatment for migrants attempting to cross the southern U.S. border, a cause Francis has championed in ways that have fueled tensions with Trump.
Francis called Seitz unexpectedly after he was photographed kneeling in prayer at a Black Lives Matter protest. Seitz said the pope thanked him without mentioning the demonstration, but the context was clear: “My recent words and actions on the events that are taking place in the country now" after Floyd's killing.
Francis was not alone in making the Vatican’s views known.
While the Holy See would be loath to be seen as picking sides prior to the U.S. election, its media operation has made clear its backing for peaceful protests, denouncing injustices suffered by black Americans and underlining its longtime support of King’s message.
Sunday’s L’Osservatore Romano newspaper featured three Floyd-related stories on its front page. The first was that 1 million people were expected to protest that day in Washington.
A second story was about a video showing two U.S. police officers shoving 75-year-old Martin Gugino, a white Catholic protester, to the ground in Buffalo. “Go watch it, please," the article said.
Its third story was about a prayer service presided over by the highest-ranking American at the Vatican, Cardinal Kevin Farrell, who decried how America’s constitutional ideals were failing its black citizens.
In an interview, Farrell said he has spoken to Francis in the past about America’s race problems, which he saw up close as an auxiliary bishop in Washington. Farrell said Francis is well versed in King and American history.
Francis “knows what the principle was and he knows what the struggle was,” Farrell said.
Natalia Imperatori-Lee, a professor of religious studies at Manhattan College, said the Vatican’s message is having an effect on American Catholics.
“We are starting to see a kind of fissure emerge,” she said. “Whether that’s going to be long lasting or whether it is a sign of a paradigm shift, I think it’s too early to tell.”
A poll from the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute last week found that the share of white Catholics holding favorable views of Trump had dropped by double digits since last year, registering 37% in the last week of May compared with 49% across 2019.
The test, Imperatori-Lee said, will be if priests are still preaching about racism in six months. And beyond that: “I guess we’ll know if this works when Catholics go to the polls in November.”
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Schor contributed from New York.
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Follow all AP coverage of the U.S. and global protests against racism and police brutality at https://apnews.com/GeorgeFloyd.

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Trump’s Most Damaging Coronavirus Lies


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Amid a crisis that demands trustworthy leadership, the president has instead sowed chaos, confusion and dangerous misinformation.


President Donald Trump has a reputation for lying, having told upwards of
 16,240 falsehoods in his first three years in office. So it’s predictable
that, when confronted with a coronavirus pandemic Trump spent weeks lying!
Instead of preparing the country to face, the lies would flow from his lie hole.
Words have consequences, and the president’s torrent of prior falsehoods has
doubtless caused damage. Much of it, however, is hard to quantify. Did his
lies about Hurricane Maria aid to Puerto Rico affect how much his government
actually sent to the island? Did his groundless false claim that
windmills cause cancer affect the renewable energy industry? Did his
Sharpie-altered hurricane forecast cause Alabama residents to flee into danger?
But the damage Trump is causing with his coronavirus mistruths is more
immediate. In some cases, Trump’s falsehoods are contributing to people’s
deaths.
Below, 10 of Trump’s most damaging coronavirus false claims:

1. “Anybody that needs a test gets a test.”


Just reported that the United States has done far more “testing” than any other nation, by far! In fact, over an eight day span, the United States now does more testing than what South Korea (which has been a very successful tester) does over an eight week span. Great job!

Trump has regularly and grossly overstated U.S. coronavirus testing capacity.
“Anybody that needs a test gets a test,” Trump said on March 6. “We — they’re
there. They have the tests. And the tests are beautiful. Anybody that needs a
test gets a test.”
By March 8, two days later, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
had conducted around 1,700 tests. The test shortage persists to this day
Why is this a problem?
It’s impossible to know where the coronavirus has spread if we’re incapable
of testing people who think they have symptoms. And if we don’t know where
it’s spreading and how fast, we can’t mobilize scarce resources like ventilators
and personal protective equipment in advance of major outbreaks. That’s how
you end up with nurses using trash bags as PPE, and dying because of it.
A lack of test kits ― and pretending it’s not a problem ― puts everyone at risk.

2. “Within a couple of days [the number of positive cases is] 

going to be down to close to zero.” 

As he pivoted from outright dismissal of a problem he said would “miraculously”
go away and began acknowledging the coronavirus was something to deal with,
Trump still downplayed the threat.
“When you have 15 [positive] people, and the 15 within a couple of days is
going to be down to close to zero,” he said on Feb. 26. “That’s a pretty good
job we’ve done.”
Why is this a problem?
Conveying the truth about the pandemic’s threat may have emphasized the
importance of early social distancing and stay-at-home orders that experts say
are critical in slowing the spread of the coronavirus.

3. “This is their new hoax.”

At a Feb. 28 rally in South Carolina, Trump accused Democrats of politicizing his lackluster coronavirus response, which he proclaimed was “one of the great jobs.”
“This is their new hoax,” he said. “We have 15 [coronavirus-positive] people in
this massive country and because of the fact that we went early, we went early,
we could have had a lot more than that.”
Why is this a problem?
The same day the CDC urged the country take “aggressive measures” to
“prevent widespread transmission of the virus,” the president undercut the
message with a much larger megaphone.Trump’s politicizing of the problem
 likely led to many of his supporters/MAGAts
failing to see the virus as a serious public health issue, and choosing not to
take steps to prevent the spread.

4.Repeated selective amnesia about having fired  experts 

whose job was to foresee exactly this situation.

Trump dismantled the National Security Council’s pandemic response unit in
2018, a subject he claims to know nothing about now that the U.S. is being
buffeted by the coronavirus pandemic.
Asked about the decision by PBS reporter Yamiche Alcindor earlier this month,
Trump said he didn’t “know anything about” it, called the question “nasty” and
moved on. (For the record, he did know, and here’s video to prove it.)
It gets worse: in July, the Trump administration eliminated a Beijing-based
American public health official whose role was to help detect disease outbreaks
in China.
Why is this a problem?
The pandemic response unit certainly would have come in handy in responding
to the coronavirus.
“It would be nice if the office was still there,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of
the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Congress.
Trump’s choice to dismantle that unit, and then to deny knowledge, shows
he wasn’t expecting a pandemic and wasn’t prepared to take the necessary
actions to deal with one, even though experts in Trump’s own government
had conducted exercises showing a pandemic could cause death, disability
and job loss that would harm the economy. 

5. “Nobody could have ever seen something like 

this coming.”

On March 25, Trump framed the pandemic as a completely unexpected
problem nobody could have prepared for. He’s done this many, many times.
Why is this a problem?
Many experts did see this coming.
“The problem is he’s using that kind of information to justify, in some way or
explain, the incompetencies of what this administration has been doing, or
not doing, in preparation for something that we knew was coming,”
Dr. Irwin Redlener, director Of Columbia University’s National Center For
Disaster Preparedness, told MSNBC on Thursday.
“The president did not cause this virus to develop,” he conceded. But Trump’s
response to the pandemic, including claiming it was unforeseeable even as it
ravaged Italy, is “leading the country in the wrong direction with misinformation
that has been extremely destructive to our efforts to combat this calamity that
we have on our doorstep.”

6. Comparing COVID-19 to the flu.

“So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu,” Trump tweeted
on Monday. “It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is
shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed
cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!”
Trump has repeatedly sought to diminish the severity of COVID-19 and
deflect blame for his administration’s failures by comparing it to something
we’re all familiar with.
Why is this a problem?
For starters, it’s false. According to Fauci, COVID-19 and all other experts
“is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu.”
Worse, Trump has begun using this false equivalence to advocate for
sending Americans back to work long before experts believe that’s wise.

7. We’re “very close” to a vaccine.  

The president has frequently overstated the speed of vaccine development,
telling the public a remedy could be available in as little as “two months”
and insisting it was “very close” in his first press conference on the matter.
Why is this a problem?
His March 2 statement was immediately corrected by Fauci: “Let me make
sure you get the ... information,” he said, noting a vaccine could be ready
“at the earliest [in] a year to a year-and-a-half, no matter how fast you go,”
something Fauci emphasized he’d told the president prior to that press
conference.
Once again, Trump ignored facts and put forth a rosier, and false, alternative
that downplays the severity of the reality at hand, potentially prompting some
to take actions that could spread the disease. Instead of offering reassuring
clarity, the president muddled the message and caused confusion.

8. Hyping a speculative, untested drug as a coronavirus treatment.

At a news conference last week, Trump repeatedly touted an anti-malarial
drug called chloroquine as a potential coronavirus treatment, going so far as
to suggest the Food and Drug Administration had approved it for COVID-19.
“It’s shown very encouraging ― very, very encouraging early results. And we’re
going to be able to make that drug available almost immediately. And that’s
where the FDA has been so great. They ― they’ve gone through the approval
process; it’s been approved. And they did it ― they took it down from many,
many months to immediate. So we’re going to be able to make that drug
available by prescription or states,” Trump said.
Why is this a problem? 
The FDA hasn’t approved chloroquine for use against COVID-19, a point the
agency was forced to clarify in a statement after Trump’s briefing. Experts said
the drug can be fatal if misused and there’s no evidence beyond anecdotal
stories that it works against COVID-19.
Trump’s statement prompted hoarding of the drug around the world, including
in the U.S., where unscrupulous doctors began fraudulently writing
themselves prescriptions for it.
An Arizona man died and his wife was hospitalized in critical condition after the
two heard Trump tout the supposedly game-changing drug on TV. They drank
an aquarium cleaning product that contained the drug because they thought it
would help them avoid contracting the disease.

9. “The cure can’t be worse than the problem.”

Trump has been rolling out variants of this line all week, using it to argue that
the economic damage caused by COVID-19 is worse than the disease
itself, and, therefore, we should cease social distancing and return to work
by Easter.
Why is this a problem?
The economic devastation being caused with much of the country shut down by coronavirus restrictions is apparent ― nobody can argue with that. But ending
social distancing efforts prematurely will stretch this crisis out longer, put
far greater strain on our health care system (leading to more deaths), and
make the coronavirus harder to control in the long run, potentially causing even
more economic disruption.

10. Bonus accidental truth: “I don’t take any responsibility at all.”

At a March 13 press conference, Trump declared a national emergency and,
when asked about repeated delays in producing and distributing coronavirus
test kits, completely washed his hands of the mess. 
“I don’t take responsibility at all,” he told reporters. While this isn’t exactly a
lie, it warrants a mention nonetheless.
Why is this a problem? 
He boasted that he had the foresight to “close up our country to China,” but
Trump failed to take more drastic action that would have easily slowed the
spread of coronavirus in the U.S., potentially saving thousands of lives. His
slow response came despite warnings from experts and U.S. intelligence
agencies, who warned him in February that coronavirus could be a global
danger, according to The Washington Post.
Trump’s rosy assessment of the pandemic’s threat to the U.S. may have been
colored by assurances from Chinese President Xi Jinping, who Trump
repeatedly praised for handling the outbreak in China. Once Trump’s
misjudgment became clear, he turned to another standby ― racism ― and
began calling the coronavirus the “China virus.” This week, following a surge
of hate crimes against Asian Americans by his MAGAt army, Trump said he
might stop using the term.
The president’s “don’t take responsibility” comment was a sharp departure
from the Trump of 2013, who tweeted: “Leadership: Whatever happens,
you’re responsible. If it doesn’t happen, you’re responsible.”
More Trump Lies:
Nina Khrushcheva: Trump's coronavirus lies and propaganda ...
Leadership: Whatever happens, you're responsible. If it doesn't happen, you're responsible.